Rings – Motion Picture Maniac

★★★★★★★★★★

“WHY… WON’T… THIS… DEAD… HORSE… GET… UP?”

I imagine these words flying from the mouth of a studio executive with booming rage as he tries his very best to justify another Ring film despite interest in the franchise dwindling quicker than flesh in a furnace, which probably started around the time a car got itself ravaged by the worst CGI deers in the history of computer graphics in The Ring Two. You would think that someone in this industry would realise that such desperate revivals are more in line to fail than succeed, indeed because of how desperate they really are, desperate to make excuses for their existence to be more precise.

I’m sorry to say that Rings is very much like that, a dead horse being flogged so relentlessly they may not have to bury or burn the remains after all, as soon there will be nothing left. The story follows some idiot young people who always just have to watch that damn video despite all the warnings in the world telling them to turn back now, oh no, wait, it’s not just a VHS tape anymore is it, remember the times they are a’changin’ and now Samara’s notorious tape exists in the form of a quick time file, and some idiot kids just have to watch it don’t they?

Seriously though, this girl’s boyfriend goes off to college and watches the video, she travels down to his location to find out what’s going on, ends up watching the video herself and must then set out on a mystery tour to learn the truths that went unnoticed in the previous Ring movies. This is not a necessarily badly made film on a technical level, the cinematography clearly had effort put into it and the presence of Samara was handled alright I guess, despite the CGI not being quite as good as maybe it should have been, but it’s ok to look at and moments of creepiness clearly indicate that the director wanted this thing to work.

However, the problem is that the whole thing is as boring as a dead slug painted grey and perched on top of a gravestone, it just went on and on and on and on, stopping every now and again so the lead character can have a scary hallucination because the writers didn’t know what needs to happen next. The opening scene on the plane is an honest indicator of two things, the acting is unbelievable, some are better than others but for the most part, no, I don’t think anyone on screen was convincing in the slightest, oh they try, but it jut doesn’t work. The second is that the dialogue is horrendous, like exposition intended for a 5 year old who really needs to sit down, shut up and pay attention because this is important.

It’s not scary, it’s not creepy, it’s not intense, it’s boring, dull and never seems to end, and speaking of the ending, oh cripes, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, makes no sense, has absolutely no reason to be like that and goes against much of what the film had already established, why does it happen? I have no idea, not the slightest clue. Almost worth watching just so you can see for yourself, almost, at least if it wasn’t so boring and generic and barely interested in itself beyond some ok cinematography and potentially interesting ideas, it does nothing to justify a continuation of this franchise and barely knows what to do with itself half the time, this whole thing needs to be thrown down a well where it belongs.

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